For there is indeed such a thing as 'physiognomic perception' which carries strong and immediate conviction. We all experience this immediacy when we look into a human face. We see its cheerfulness or gloom, its kindliness or harshness, without being aware of reading 'signs'. . . . It is obvious that not only poetry but all the arts rely on these responses for some of their effects. What we call the 'expressive' character of sounds, colours or shapes, is after all nothing but this capacity to evoke 'physiognomic' reactions.
E. H. Gombrich 1
Disposition, the single work in this exhibition by Stefan Chinov, consists of two parts. Both parts are plaster, cast in plywood molds, approximately eight feet by four feet by fourteen inches high. Approximately, as neither part is simply a rectalinear solid: both entail multiple, complex, and subtle shifts of their planes. The surfaces retain the impression of the texture of the plywood forms. One part is stained pale red ochre, almost pink, the other part pale cool gray, almost blue. Low in the small but high ceiling space of the Studio Gallery, the two parts of Disposition fill most of the floor, while opening the volume above them. Walking into the Studio Gallery, one's path is displaced by the two pieces: one may walk around them, or between them, but the space left for walking is small, so that one is aware of one's walking as one makes one's way around the pieces.
The two parts of Disposition rest on the floor without being completely in contact with the floor, but rather touching the floor in places and lifting from the floor elsewhere. The reddish part moves upward at its center, resting on its shorter sides. The bluish part rests on an axis near the center, bowing to its shorter sides. The movement of the pieces off the floor plane suggests, through the sense of resistance to gravity that it entails, that the pieces are relatively thin, hollow shells rather than solid cast plaster.
It will, perhaps, seem strange to have opened this discourse engaging an artwork consisting of two quite abstract forms with an epigraph asserting the role of "physiognomic perception" as the urground of the expressiveness of shapes qua shapes, and all the more so inasmuch as the author of the epigraph famously urges the practice of "schema and correction" as the central method of a view of western art history as memesis in which the notion of progress in art subsists in increasingly accurate making and matching between representation and representand. 2 Gombrich's idea was rendered problematical by the modernist project, for it fails to account for the shifts and moves modernism introduces. It may nevertheless provide some insight into the making of the shifts and moves of Chinov's Disposition, if one understands the matching entailed in the work does not consist in a simplistic notion of mimesis, of the form of the artwork with the form of an external object in the world, nor of the form of the artwork with the mental representation of an external object, nor of an entirely conceptual object (a unicorn, for example), but rather with the movements of the mind as such.
The mind is embodied in a lived body, prior to any constructed body qua object. One finds a precedent to the forms of Chinov's work in cast concrete military fortifications, as in the Nazi constructions comprising Festung Europa; indeed, Chinov has acknowledged this source, along with the monks cells in Eastern Orthodox monasteries. 4 In the subtlety of the shifts of the planes of the pieces, and in the site-responsive motivation of those shifts, one might find a parallel in Robert Irwin's unrealized project for the Oval Mall of Ohio State University, Tilted Planes, 1978. Yet prior to all of these formal precedents to Chinov's Disposition is the lived experience of the body, of its disposing itself within the domain of gravity, of its inflections of gestural expression.
If one regards the movements and shifts of the planes of Disposition as correlative with the movements and shifts of the mind, one is appealling to an expressionist theory of art 5 in a most fundamental way, for to so regard the form of Disposition is to suppose that the artwork is an exteriorization of interiority per se. 'Disposition' is one's temperament, one's inclination, one's habitual frame of mind. 'Disposition' is also a particular settling of matters, and the power to do so. In both of these senses, the notion of finality obtains. The form of Disposition contradicts this, not only in the shifting of the planes of the work, but in the roughness of the surfaces implying just-madeness and an unfinished status, and especially in the twofold character of the work. Twofoldness implies a decision yet unmade; in twofoldness the possibility of choosing this or that subsists in futurity. At least within a logic of either / or, twofoldness implies the futurity of a decision in choosing this or that. One might instead choose a logic of "and / or: one, the other, or both." Either / or entails dualism, with the virgule a signifier of separation, Cartesian in its completeness of rationality and, modern. And / or entails duality, with the virgule a signifier of conjoining, Gödelian in its intrinsic incompleteness and, postmodern.
Along with the differences between the two components of Disposition, the differences of surface within the separate sections of the field in juxtaposition emphasizes the common edge as the liminal zone between field sections. The boundary of the field edge is a visual virgule, at once separating and joining. The liminal virgule as the shifter between zones is the trace of this underlying play of différance-what is at once different spatially and what is deferred temporally-embedded in the structure of Chinov's forms as the disclosing the turnings and foldings of possibilities at the level of structural configuration, which is to say at the level of the movement of the mind in its shiftings. That level is without limit. Thus Jean Piaget:
The idea of a form system of abstract structures is thereby transformed into that of the construction of a never completed whole, the limits of formalization constituting the ground for incompleteness, or, as we put it earlier, incompleteness being the necessary consequence of the fact that there is no "terminal" or "absolute" form because any content is form relative to some inferior content and any form the content of some higher form. 9
Stefan Chinov received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Academy of the Arts, Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University. He is Instructional Associate and Adjunct Professor in ceramics at Brookhaven College. Recent exhibitions include: MIX Series!: works by Stefan Chinov, Dallas Contemporary Visual Arts Center, 2002.